Notices

The trouble of all this stuff is that for 'generic' use you don't need technologies like this at all. There is nothing new required to firuge out how many active cellphones you have on a certain road, how fast thay are travelling, etc. The point here is that they are linking actual _persons_ to these little spots on the screen. And that's why privacy is a concern. A cellphone as such is a number, but now you're adding a face to it (with locations, behaviour tracking good for data mining, etc). You even have ad 'conversions' as you can tell if a person actually went to a restaurant you suggested. Also, never forget about phishing practices, these will not disappear but likely adapt to the new medium as well. A privacy-wise well educated person can understand the benefits and risks and make his/her decision, but plenty of people can't or won't really understand what they're getting into. Many social sites have the same problem, but those are much more virtual and hence pose less risk.

Ok, so resurrecting an old thread, sorry.

Anyway, has anyone looked at whether we could use Latitude?

We now have some web runtimes working and that can be integrated in stand-alone applications (e.g. see Macuco and the recently released Phonegap).

So using Google Maps should be easy enough from what I've read (I hasten to add I'm not a web programmer).

There is also a Google Latitude api for finding the positions of people: http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_geolocation.html, which could presumably be added to a map overlay or the like, so at this point we'd be able to see the location of people on Latitude (I think).

and there's an api which allows you to ask Google for your location: http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ge..._protocol.html

Now, although we don't necessarily need the location information, I wonder if using this service would allow us to appear on Latitude too (and therefore make us visible to other people too)?

Any thoughts or ideas?

in one of the repositories for n900 there is a geolocation plugin for microb, but don't know if it working. tried with google maps on n900 but nothing happened

Use it with the maeMaps webapp

I am guessing if MicroB gets around to completely supporting HTML5, it could use the proposed geolocation API (http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html). Unofficially, I think Webkit already has some hooks into this because the iPhone and Android browsers both make use of it. I have no idea if the Gecko engine has this or not.

I think that's what this does, though not having looked at the source I can't be sure.

My general interest was not so much in how to get the location data, but in how to share it with some service that other people use. Google Latitude is available as part of Google Maps on pretty much every phone these days, so it makes sense to try to use the same service.

Latitude uses URLs to set it, as far as I know: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/goo...aring-api.html

So it's not hard to implement it either..

Which points to a Google Geo Dev blog which says...
"there is currently no API to let you modify your location."

Ok, so I decided to do some looking. The iPhone version of Latitude is run thorough a webpage, so I thought I might give the same a go.

Seems to work.

Install the maemo-geolocation plugin for the browser;

In the browser open "http://www.google.co.uk/maps/m?view=...urce=mog&gl=uk" which is the page the iPhone opens. There doesn't seem to be a check on the useragent (except if you try to open google.co.uk directly).

I guess it will be something similar for people not in the UK, a combination of desktop Firefox + "User Agent Switcher" + tcpdump should tell you exactly if you can't work it out by guessing.

Then click away and use the (web)app.

Location updates seem to work automatically.

I've not done much testing, but am ever hopeful this will give us access to a shared location service (as Latitude is sort of a de-facto standard now as it's supported by so many phones).

The one thing I have noticed is that it doesn't change the "last updated" time for a user, this is changed, iirc, if you use the Google homepage Latitude applet, so there's presumably some way of doing it.

Let me know if it does or doesn't work for you.

Woohoo!

Thanks, lardman. Your instructions worked for me!

I installed the geolocation plugin and then changed the URL to the North American version.



I'm in a concrete building so my GPS is only getting "coarse accuracy", but that's ok for the purposes of the screenshot

EDIT: It does seem to be updating my location every few minutes...

EDIT2: It looks beautiful in full screen mode!